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Ken Butigan

Ken Butigan is director of Pace e Bene, a nonprofit organization fostering nonviolent change through education, community and action. He also teaches peace studies at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago.

Articles by this author

ViewsWednesday, May 21, 2014Remembering Vincent Harding, An Enduring Veteran of HopeHistorian by profession and relentless nonviolent advocate by calling, Vincent Gordon Harding died on Monday, May 19, at the age of 83. The author of a series of books on the civil rights movement — which he called the Southern Freedom movement — he not only wrote history, but also played an active...Read more

ViewsMonday, May 12, 2014Daniel Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh and a World Where Everyone MattersThirty-three years ago this summer I was stopped in my tracks by the clarity and power of Daniel Berrigan’s words — and nothing has been the same since. Today, as Berrigan turns 93, the memory of that encounter comes back with all its vivid force. At the time, I was researching the impacts of...Read more

ViewsThursday, December 19, 2013Conscientious Objectors Needed Now More Than EverIn our present age of permanent war, it is almost impossible to recall a time when armed conflicts clearly began and ended. In that ancient, bygone era — say, before 2003 — one could judiciously ruminate on an impending war before it got rolling and make a choice about it.Read more

ViewsSaturday, September 14, 2013Renouncing the Right to Bear DronesThe riveting attention paid to chemical weapons in Syria over the past few weeks is not a new phenomenon. Our revulsion has its roots in World War I’s searing plumes of mustard gas that decimated thousands of troops and that still swirl through the trenches of our collective mind. But it is also grounded in our conscious or unconscious memory of every pivotal moment in the history of war when one combatant’s edge widened incrementally or dramatically over another with the latest innovation in killing.Read more

ViewsThursday, May 23, 2013Envisioning an International Treaty Banning DronesTwo decades from now, social commentators may very well decide, with hindsight, that 2013 was an historic turning point. Humanity has an urgent choice to make about many monumental crises — including climate change, economic inequality, democracy for sale and resource wars — and opportunities.Read more

ViewsMonday, December 17, 2012Building a Nonviolent Culture After NewtownThe December 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. that left 28 people dead — including 20 children — has sent shock waves through our society. It penetrated the elaborate defenses that we as individuals and as a culture have erected to live with the internal contradictions of the bargain we have made to both oppose and embrace violence. Occasionally reality exposes and trumps the cognitive dissonance of this uneasy but deeply embedded arrangement.Read more

ViewsFriday, November 02, 2012Challenging the ‘Disposition Matrix’ and Its Ever-Expanding Kill ListLast week The Washington Post published a three-part series on the U.S. government’s dramatic increase in targeted killing, and the steps being taken to institutionalize extra-judicial assassination as standard operating procedure far into the future. “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it,” the series reports.Read more

ViewsThursday, October 13, 2011Anti-Drone Movement GrowsA friend of mine once called Las Vegas “the Lourdes of America.” People come looking for a miracle, but it’s the casinos that mostly cash in. This doesn’t stop the 36 million pilgrims who travel annually to this neon oasis, searching for some indefinable fulfillment, away from home, untethered from their habitual routines and inhibitions, a little off-balance, spending money like the water that is rapidly disappearing in this overbuilt desert.Read more

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